I've used YNAB for a few years for zero-based budgeting. It works, but I never once used the automatic bank import — I just manually enter everything. Paying $109/yr (plus tax) for that felt like a lot. Their pricing went up over the years too and there's only one plan, so you're paying for auto-import whether you want it or not.
So I built ZeroSum (zerosum.so). The idea is simple — if you don't need bank sync, you shouldn't pay for it.
Basic plan is $50/yr, Pro with automatic bank sync is $70/yr. Both still cheaper than YNAB.
Tech-wise it's a React frontend (Vite + Tanstack Router + Tanstack Query) with a Node backend (Hono + tRPC) hosted on Cloudflare Pages (Client) and Render (API + DB). Fully responsive, works well on mobile.
I built a YNAB import wizard so people can migrate their existing budgets and accounts without having to start over.
Things I think turned out well: the reporting and analytics are a lot more useful than what I had in YNAB, the UI feels more modern, and the whole thing just feels snappier to me. Again, biased.
Being honest about what's not ready yet — the Pro plan with bank sync isn't active. We're waiting on Plaid to approve our access. And a native mobile app is something I want to do but no date on that.
Would love feedback from anyone who does zero-based budgeting or has opinions on the UX. Happy to talk about the technical side too if anyone's curious.